A for Autophobia
by Stariceling
Summary: Jonathan's afterlife in the Hall of Crippling Phobias is monotonous and lonely, except for the times when Sock shows up. Technically a sequel to "The Bridge" though they don't need to be read together.


I present to you a short fic exploring if Jonathan did "punch his own ticket" and ended up alphabetizing the Hall of Crippling Phobias. Technically a sequel to "The Bridge" but I don't think you need to read that first if you don't want to. This does mention Jonathan's death/injuries, however. Implied established relationship between Jonathan and Sock. (I almost want to write something more fluffy and happy with them in Hell together. I don't even know.)

Autophobia = fear of being isolated or abandoned  
Acrophobia= fear of heights  
Spectrophobia = fear of mirrors  
Phobophobia = fear of developing a phobia.

* * *

Jonathan remembers a quote that, 'Hell is other people,' but for him Hell is a solitary experience. His Hell is endless halls of filing cabinets, an 'urgent' box that never empties, oceans of manilla folders, and so many paper cuts he thinks he should be bled dry by now. Hell is silence with a crackle of flames and the grumble of construction so far in the background that it fuzzes into static.

Having a private hell is a mixed blessing, but he's not always alone. Some days Sock drops in from Earth.

He appears all at once and perches on one of the filing cabinets, swinging his feet and watching Jonathan with a predatory grin. He looks more like a demon now than when Jonathan was alive. His eyes glow in dangerous green shades of hellfire. Wings stretch from his shoulders, all skeletal bones and leather. He has a spaded tail he sometimes keeps wrapped lazily around his waist, though Jonathan notices the tip tapping against Sock's hip in time with his footfalls.

"Get down from there before you knock it over," Jonathan mutters without pausing in his work. He has an armful of files that belong under acrophobia, which is one fear he particularly hates handling. They make him feel dizzy, unsettled and exposed, no matter how solid the ground is under his feet.

Sock drops down from his perch and stalks Jonathan. His tail uncoils and raises, twitching, like an eager cat's.

Jonathan ignores him in favor of shoving the files in the drawer where they belong. The moment he closes the drawer Sock pounces. He leaps up on Jonathan's back, clawed nails pricking through his clothes, and bites down on the side of Jonathan's neck. Except, being Sock, he has to provide his own sound effects.

"Om-nom-nom-nom-nom!"

"Sock, cut it out!"

"You were ignoring me," Sock mutters petulantly into his neck. "I hate when you ignore me."

"I'm not ignoring you." Jonathan reaches up to stroke his fingers over Sock's chin, past the corner of his mouth and across his cheek. Sock nips at his fingertips.

"Don't you ever get a day off?"

"Not really." Time here isn't divided neatly into days, and Jonathan has nothing to keep track of how it passes on Earth except for Sock's visits. "But it's eternity. No one's going to give a damn if I take a break for a while."

The world foreshortens under his feet so that it only takes three steps to leave the endless miles of filing cabinets. Sock hangs like a dead weight down his back, nibbling absentmindedly on his earlobe as the hall rushes by to land them in the cluttered space that works as Jonathan's office. It's mostly just a place to dump all the files waiting to be sorted.

Once the floor snaps back into place under them, Sock hops down with a gleeful cry of, "Coffee!" One unexpected perk of working here is that the coffee is always hot, even if left sitting for however long Sock has been gone. It would be nicer if Jonathan actually drank coffee.

"That's the last thing you need," Jonathan complains. He pulls a pile of assorted files off of his chair, feeling a non-specific prickle of fear at the back of his neck before he dumps them on the floor so he can sit down.

Sock perches on Jonathan's desk, setting off a small avalanche of manilla folders in the process.

"So, it's your day off?" Jonathan asks. He feels awkward and out of practice trying to start conversations, but Sock never seems to mind.

"Oh yeah, my assignment. Actually they have him on so many drugs right now I don't think he can see straight, let alone see me. So I'm taking a break for a while. Maybe when I pop back in the shock will get him, but I might lose this one."

Not everyone dies of their demons. Accidents happen, or outside forces intervene. There are a lot of things that can save a person's body or soul. Sock's record is good, but not perfect. Jonathan is never entirely sure how he feels about that.

Sock is quiet for a moment, sipping coffee out of his favorite mug, the one with a picture of a big red heart and a knife piercing through it. His tail taps at the desk in an agitated tempo, and while Jonathan is wary of Sock's ongoing body modification, he's still grateful when Sock's tail is easier to read than his face.

"Come here."

Even though Sock sets his coffee aside, he still makes Jonathan get out of his chair to gather him into his lap. Once caught, Sock settles against him, resting his head on Jonathan's chest and twining his tail around his thigh so that the tip pokes at the back of his knee.

Sock reaches up to run his fingers gently over the concave part of Jonathan's skull. There are no mirrors in this part of Hell. There must be some somewhere, for the souls with spectrophobia if nothing else, but Jonathan doesn't need them to be reminded he's still carrying the wounds he died from.

He wraps one arm around Sock, his arm with the bones so shattered he has difficulty remembering where it is and isn't supposed to bend. His other hand seeks refuge in Sock's hair, fingers pushing up under the ridiculous hat he still wears.

Sock's hair is soft between his fingers. Jonathan doesn't feel the burning disconnect between living and demon flesh when they touch anymore, but his hair is still impossibly soft. (Not just on his head, but everywhere is should be wiry and coarse. Jonathan has explored this at length.)

He mentioned it once, in what he would plead was a moment of insanity, that Sock's hair is soft as angel down. If angels have down feathers, which he had assumed they should. The words only slipped out because he spent too much time thinking them. He has too much time to himself here. Time to get used to his own tuneless voice and to make up his own terrible song lyrics because he misses music so badly it aches.

Sock only laughed and told him that angel feathers aren't soft at all, they're jagged and barbed. Jonathan is fascinated by the idea but at the same time he doesn't want the details of how Sock knows.

He rubs his fingers into Sock's scalp, waiting for the outburst that he knows is coming from the way Sock's grip slowly tightens on him.

"I just want to kill him! Why can't I just stab him and get it over with? It takes forever this way and it's not fair!"

Jonathan mumbles soothing nothings under Sock's rant, only interrupting to inform Sock that he does not suck at his job. He got to Jonathan, didn't he? So he's not allowed to say that anymore.

He doesn't completely understand what goes through Sock's head, why it's difficult for him to slowly drive people to their deaths when he genuinely wants to kill. Then again, he knows Sock can't understand what the filing is like, either, picking up each file and feeling the fear inside even when it isn't his own crippling phobia. (Phobophobia is particularly annoying, considering the location, and lingers long after he's put the files away.)

Sock can't perform a mercy killing on his victims any more than Jonathan can take down his own file and tear it up into nothing. Maybe every single 'demon,' Hell-bound or Earth-bound, has their own demons they can't shake. It makes sense, in a way. It is Hell. Just because they're working stiffs here doesn't necessarily mean they should be spared from torment.

As for Jonathan, he lives in fear, in every way possible. He fears Sock will change, will stop being Sock and become more like the career demons who resist all assumptions that they were ever anything that could be mistaken for human. He fears Sock will fall in love with some new assignment. Sock could be fired, or find someone to give a share of his precious free time, or even leave Jonathan behind entirely.

Everything Jonathan fears is filed away neatly under 'A,' locked away in its drawer but never quite forgotten.

"I miss killing people," Sock finally sighs as he flops against Jonathan's chest.

"You could get transferred to Hell-bound duty. I'm sure they have a position open stabbing things." Jonathan can't pretend he enjoys Sock's hobbies, but he at least remembers what makes him happy.

"It's not the same." Sock is apparently determined to be a pitiful little maniac today. He goes limp in his sulk and aims wide puppy eyes at Jonathan.

"Then what do you want? What do you want that I can actually do for you?"

Sock doesn't answer for a while, which confuses Jonathan. Usually when Sock wants something he's extremely straightforward about it.

"It's summer," he finally says. "Did you know, the murder rate goes way up in summer? And. . . there's a lot of outside concerts. And it's going to be a while before I can go back to my assignment. And you must have some vacation time saved up by now."

"Yeah," Jonathan agrees, without waiting for Sock to frame it as a question. "Let's go."

When he has Sock with him like this the silence and the loneliness ease back until there is nothing left to fear. Sock is the reason he's here. But at the same time, Sock is the only thing that makes him sometimes feel like he's not in Hell.


End file.
